Alaska. Even when I think about it, a hollow sense of the vast wide open makes my stomach drop a little. I’ve traveled to Alaska a few times and I truly love it; its primitive beauty is breathtaking—though I’m not sure I could live there. I’ve visited the big city of Anchorage, the capital city…
I am in awe of Truman Capote’s work. He is an exquisite writer. If you read Other Voices Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Music for Chameleons, which includes the brilliant novella “Handcarved Coffins,” you’ll see what I mean. They are literary classics.
I’d like to start this review of Joe R. Lansdale’s The Bottoms by admitting that my only exposure to his work prior to this 2001 Edgar Award winner was a love of the film adaptation of Bubba Ho-Tep (which I only recently learned was based on a Lansdale short story) and a general understanding of…
Having grown up with multiple dogs and now living with three spoiled mutts, I’ve learned quite a bit about the canine species. Of course, all of the dogs in my family have been consistently unemployed, unless you count barking to announce the arrival of the mail carrier as a job. When I set out to…
Jan Burke wrote what would become the first of ten crime novels featuring journalist Irene Kelly in the evening hours after work. That manuscript, Goodnight, Irene (1993), sold to Simon & Schuster without the benefit of an agent or solicitation—and readers took note when then-President Bill Clinton mentioned it during his first White House interview…
So how did we go from small-town country boys to uniformed police officers in our local communities, to U.S. federal drug agents, to being “the guys who inspired the hit Netflix series Narcos,” to authors? Believe us when we say, no one is more surprised by all of this than we are! Javier grew up…
Some things just never go out of style. Like nostalgia. And the further we get, the more people like to look back. Folks will always love to romanticize the past; put it up on a pedestal as if it was better or more exciting than the turbulent, messy present. Since the past is an open…
The painter Paul Cézanne was never comfortable with the Paris art scene, despite claiming he would change it “with an apple” (and he did). He was mal à l’aise with people, especially the fashionable, the wealthy. He once said, “The world doesn’t understand me and I don’t understand the world, that’s why I’ve withdrawn from…
But my confidence was cosmetic. Neither I nor anyone I knew in Deaf Smith had any influence over Vernon Smothers. He believed intransigence was a virtue, a laconic and mean-spirited demeanor was strength, reason was a tool the rich used to keep the poor satisfied with their lot, and education amounted to reading books full…
Join New York Times bestselling author Shelley Noble for a look back at four iconic women and their equally memorable sleuths who would change the Gilded Age mystery genre forever and inspired her new novel!
